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Matt is a General Partner at Commerce Ventures. He has been an investor in and operator…
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Matthew Nichols shared thisGreat new product from Lioran Pinchevski and the whole Finaloop team. When I ran a brand, we spent so much time and effort building tools and hiring people to do a fraction of what Margins can do. I wish this product was around 10 years ago!
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Matthew Nichols shared thisIt's been a while since we've seen a fundamentally new ecommerce platform. We think the time is now. As consumers become accustomed to LLM-based journeys, they will expect those journey's to continue as they migrate to ecommerce sites. This will require an entirely new approach. One that embraces journeys over static catalogs, and continues the conversation from LLMs and other AI-native discovery tools.
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Matthew Nichols shared thisIt was great to see so many of our LPs, portfolio company CEOs, and friends at our Commerce Summit last week. We covered a lot of ground - from Stablecoins to Agentic Commerce, and everything in between.
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Matthew Nichols shared thisCongrats Scot Wingo and the ReFiBuy.ai team. Thanks for including us in your journey at both the pre-seed and seed rounds. Agentic Commerce is already changing retail, and I couldn't think of a better team to go after this opportunity!Matthew Nichols shared thisToday, we’re excited to announce $13.6M in oversubscribed Seed funding. The round was led by NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Ridge Ventures, Silicon Road Ventures, Incubate Fund, Vela Partners, G20 Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Knoll Ventures, and retail industry angel investors. The next platform shift in commerce is here. AI shopping agents are becoming the new interface consumers use to research, find, and buy products. Most product catalogs, however, were built for human browsing, marketplace feeds, and keyword-driven discovery, not for the way agents evaluate and recommend products. That shift is creating a new operating discipline for commerce teams: Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO). We defined ACO and built the platform to operationalize it, giving brands and retailers the infrastructure they need to prepare their catalogs for AI-powered shopping. This funding will help us scale the platform, accelerate go-to-market, and support more brands and retailers as they compete in the agentic commerce era. Thank you to our customers, investors, partners, advisors, and team for helping us build the commerce intelligence layer for what comes next. We’re just getting started. Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/e7utAgxX
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Matthew Nichols shared thisWe are excited to be on the journey together with Wiley Jones, Arnav Mishra, and the entire DOSS team. We've had a long-running thesis around the need for a modern ERP and were incredibly impressed by what the Doss team has built. As a former retail exec who nearly made the mistake of doing a full Netsuite implementation, I know the pain of needing an operational system, but not wanting to adapt my business to fit a piece of outdated software.Matthew Nichols shared thisAfter 3.5 years of building and absolutely RIPPING Celsius… We’re announcing that DOSS has raised a $55M Series B, co-led by Madrona and Premji Invest, with Greyhound Capital, Commerce Ventures, Pathlight Ventures, and Intuit Ventures as new investors, and continued investment from Theory Ventures, General Catalyst, Contrary, and Mintaka VC. Before starting DOSS I worked on numerous hardware products. Honestly my opinion today is pretty much unchanged: it’s a miracle that any get built at all. I saw firsthand how the physical world runs on systems that were designed by people who’d never use them. Teams would adapt their entire business strategy to fit into the shape of off-the-shelf applications and would spend 4-10x more on consulting time than on the software itself. Worst of all - they’d wait YEARS for implementations to complete which ultimately wouldn’t reflect how the business actually functioned by the time it was live. That's the problem we're solving. DOSS is the Operations Cloud built for the Real World. We sit around your general ledger and model how your business actually runs. Procurement, inventory, orders, finance, all connected, all in real time. We're already seeing it work. Teams with individual people saving 20+ hours a week (that’s half of their time!). Companies growing 3x in a year without adding any headcount to operations. With Operations Cloud, teams are putting up Hall of Fame stats and we’re. just. getting. started. HUGE thank you to our customers, our new investors, our long-time advisors, and most of all the DOSS TEAM!!!! We're building something that can stand the test of time (no small feat in enterprise software). Enabling platform shifts like this happen roughly once a generation and as Jeremy Irons says in Margin Call, “Don’t you understand? THIS IS IT!” ONWARD! There’s work to be done.
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Matthew Nichols shared thisCongrats to Josh Payne and the Coframe team for winning the judges' choice award in the startup competition at Shoptalk. As part of our partnership with Shoptalk, we have awarded Coframe a $100k investment from Commerce Ventures. Excited to have Josh and the team join the Commerce Ventures family! It was great to evaluate so many great companies alongside my co-judges Deborah Weinswig 韋葆蘭, Kamanasish Kundu, and Brent Murri.
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Matthew Nichols shared thisThe opportunity to build an AI-native email platform is one of the largest opportunities sitting in plain sight. It has been the category in commerce infrastructure that has produced the most $1Bn+ exits, and yet everyone seems to think there won't be a new killer email platform. I think they are wrong...The Case for an AI-First ESP: The Next Billion-Dollar OpportunityThe Case for an AI-First ESP: The Next Billion-Dollar Opportunity
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Matthew Nichols shared thisSo proud of John Andrews , Vivek and the full Cimulate AI team. We were fortunate enough to be investors and appreciate all of the hard work to get to this outcome.Matthew Nichols shared thisToday is a very big day for the team at Cimulate. We announced that we signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Salesforce. Moments like this only happen when the right idea meets the right technology, team, and market timing. Over the past few years generative AI has fundamentally changed the way people – and now agents – buy. We were fortunate to be building for that future just as the market was ready for it. Salesforce has been making significant investments in Agentforce Commerce, and their acquisition of Cimulate is a testament to their deep commitment to the future of agentic commerce. We couldn’t imagine a better partner to help scale Cimulate, and my co-founder Vivek and I have felt great alignment since the very first conversation. As one of our investors said, if the stars align, you don’t fight the fortuitous gravitational pull. This is only the beginning! To our team and customers: Get excited. We are going to be able to build faster and deliver even greater impact than we could have alone. Read the full announcement in the Salesforce Newsroom: https://lnkd.in/enb-H6rg Read more from me on our website: https://lnkd.in/evY4jNasBuilding the Future of Commerce Together with Salesforce - Cimulate AIBuilding the Future of Commerce Together with Salesforce - Cimulate AI
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Matthew Nichols shared thisI write here about why high-take rate intermediaries may be at risk as Agentic Commerce gains momentum.The End of the Middleman Economy: How AI Agents Will Disrupt High-Take-Rate PlatformsThe End of the Middleman Economy: How AI Agents Will Disrupt High-Take-Rate Platforms
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Pradip Shah Oh - I agree. People want to browse, but I'd think of it more like a guided browsing behavior. I'd think about the algoritms that drive short-form video (youtube, tictoc, etc). The AI takes you through a journey of discovery, rather than the user being forced to nagivate explicitly.
Matthew Nichols replied to a comment
4w
Rebeca Guzman Vidal I think this sort of data sharing has to happen. My current thinking is that retailers and AI platforms could share personal data in the form of ranked catalogs. Ie - I don't have to share specific data about a consumer, but I can provide a ranked list of products, services, etc. that would be most interesting to a specific user based on the proprietary data you know about them. Avoids privacy regulations, and the legitimate hesitatncy on both sides to ship off valuable customer information.
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2mo
Wow Ivan Mazour is collecting quite an amazing set of advisors. First Bridget Johns-Pavlopoulos and now Michael Relich. Well done!!
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Matthew Nichols liked thisMatthew Nichols liked thisI never wanted the Patagonia vest, but damn I always thought venture capital was cool. When I was 26, the feeling was decidedly not mutual. I was rejected by a soul-crushing 35 VC funds. I decided to get my yah yahs out playing drums in two very politically incorrect bands before starting to grind as an entrepreneur. I learned how to hire, raise capital, hit payroll, acquire companies, suffer panic attacks, and mercifully engineer two exits. Twenty years building companies in the arena taught me how to speak founder. I could help people make sense of the 0 to 1. And I could empathize with the regular kicks to the nuts that is entrepreneurialism. So, in 2022 I gave myself the VC job no one else would. mu ventures is now 46 companies strong. We also built the Rec Room for deal sharing, Tap Night for meeting top-tier founders, and the Mu-niversal Get Down, our annual bacchanal. None of it feels like work. We’re now 5 years in, and I’m keepin’ the job baby! Today we closed Mu Ventures II, a $15.5M pre-seed and seed stage fund anchored by AngelList Asset Management, their quantitative fund of funds. These guys are brilliant, and their model for predicting future fund performance chose us. Their team reached out because our performance ranked top 3% of the hundreds of funds on their platform. We're incredibly thankful for their support, and the support of Dynamism Capital and our other 63 LPs. Now the most important part…. Founders - if you want a super competitive, fun-loving maniac that will never stop hustling for you, keep reading. We will evaluate you on the merits, not on your cap table. We don’t borrow conviction from anyone. We’ll treat you like a person, and not a return profile, because we kind of need to like you. Life is too short to back assholes. We're focused on Vertical AI, with plenty of marketplaces, CPG, and commerce infra in the portfolio. But mostly, we’re founder-obsessed, not category-constrained. Our sweet spot is $200-600k checks into pre-seed companies raising under $10m post and seed companies raising under $20m post. If you're one of the beautifully insane maniacs ripping friction out of something big, and you naturally attract talent, customers, and capital, come find me!
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Matthew Nichols liked thisMatthew Nichols liked thisAfter nearly 11 incredible years, I’ve wrapped up my journey at Toast. It’s hard to capture what makes Toast such a special place, but three things stand out: First, an unwavering commitment to customers. Every decision starts with helping restaurants + retailers succeed, and that focus has always been at the heart of the company. Second, the people. I’ve never worked with a team that cared more deeply or brought more energy to solving hard problems - all while having a little fun along the way. And finally, the opportunity to be part of an exponential chapter of growth. I joined Toast in 2015 when it was still in its early days and had the privilege of helping build the company into what it is today. Seeing that journey unfold has been an extraordinary experience. Aman Narang, Steve Fredette and Jonathan Grimm - thank you for the opportunity. To Michel Rbeiz, Nick DeLeonardis and Tim Barash - thank you for your support. To Elena Gomez - thank you for the mentorship. What I’ll miss most are people - the Toasters, customers and partners - I had the privilege of working and growing alongside. Thank you to everyone who made the past 11 years so memorable, I hope our paths cross again. To the Fintech and Payments teams I had the honor of leading - thanks for having me. Watching so many of you grow into exceptional operators + leaders and being part of that journey has been immensely rewarding. You are the reason this was a difficult decision and I will miss everyone. As for what’s next, I’m taking a break to spend time with my family, especially my two young daughters. If you asked my girls what I did at Toast, they’d tell you, “bossing” - a description I find equal parts hilarious and horrifying. For now, this next chapter is all about them and I’m sure they will waste no time reminding me who’s really in charge. I was lucky enough to have them help me close it out right on Toast’s ‘Crouton Day’ earlier this month, here is a snap from that day along with a few other favorites -
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Matthew Nichols liked thisMatthew Nichols liked thisOur 2nd annual Innovators Showcase at NRF Retail's Big Show Europe is shaping up to be a “can’t miss event!” This year’s exhibitors are bringing groundbreaking AI technologies addressing top retailer priorities – from customer retention and online conversion, to in-store engagement and product discovery, inventory management, last-mile delivery and much more. Want to be part of this exclusive retail-tech showcase? Applications close July 10th – and spots are filling up fast. Secure yours today by applying here: https://lnkd.in/dRZmiVwM Thank you to the NRF Advisory Committee for help identifying top technologies: Scott Friend, Dave Finnegan, Karla Martin, Miguel Bagulho, Susan Akbarpour, Tessa Flippin, Debra Langley, Arpon Ray, Matthew Nichols, Smriti Jayaraman Kekre, Bill Purcell, Richard (Rickie) Koo, Leo Nagdas, David Grant, Marigay McKee, Sucharita Kodali, Saranathan Govindarajan, Jean-Michel Kientz, Kathy Gromotka, Claire Chang,Logan Langberg, Vincent Diallo, Peter Burggraaff OLY, Janie Yu, Alicia Teo, Greg Merrill, Josh Jewett, Ignacio Miranda, Oren Paran, David Matthews, Sid Mookerji, Andrew Stott, Jackie T., Richard Kestenbaum, Liam Buswell, Ingrid Maes, Ram Rampalli, Seth Webb. #NRF2026 #NRFEurope #InnovatorsShowcase #RetailTechnology #Startups #ConsumerTech #AgenticCommerce #AI
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